> Slightly complicating the fact was that nobody (not even Jeff) has the source to those games anymore, so they had to write them based on playing the emulation versions, and some of them didn't bother to play for long enough (like their version of Ancipital, which lacks many of the features found in the original)
Source?? Many of those games were written in very primitive assemblers or in machine code directly (no usable assemblers in the early days of the C64)
I'm not implying you are lying, I am implying that it is a bug that should not be hard to spot, and it surprises me. Bugs in OSS software are entirely possible;)
> Don't get too excited by this, we have fifty of them here.
Except for the fact that the peopel livign in those 50 can still vote.. not that it really makes a difference this time.. (hmm. come to think of it, it didn't matter much last time either)
Ambient noise is really no big problem at all as long as a proper microphone is used and the system is trained in a noisy environment.. beign in a hurry is a problem tho.
On another note, there are more opinions then good/bad.
Propaganda is the proper term for your post, it is simplistic and meant to trigger emotion and prevent reason. That formula is well known and is very recognizable by anyone who for example has looked into what happened during the cold war or in nazi germany. Incidentely, the Bush government has used it very succesfully to prepare the American population for the Iraq war also.
A special purpose dictation system can do as well as a human who has no direct interest in the result, overlooked by someone who has a direct interest in correct results is going to do a lot better. The inmediate availability and very little administration efford often outweight the little extra time spent on reading and correcting on the fly.
I have been doing technical support for IBMs dictation software for a while in 1996-97 and a substantial part of our customers back then were doctors and lawyers. Both used special purpose dictionaries and reported that it worked quite well. I would be really surprised if this has gotten worse in the last few years.
Things like medical transcriptions are a lot easier then general purpose transcriptions for a computer and can be a lot more accurate due to more specialized and limited dictionaries.
Well, you were the one who brought up AMI Pro ad said it didn't provide the geatures needed, and you refered to it again in this last post.
Obviously you are giving a slightly simplified picture of the choice and reality looked more like this: AMI Pro, Did not provide the features. WP, Has the features but its broken. Word, Has the features and actually works.
By the way, there was a rather workable DOS version of WP5, which was quite usable in a DOS window provided you managed to get enough free base memory.
My time is much better spent using a working layout tool when I need it, ie: the 'simple' and limited tools that OO.o (or when it works, Word) offer for simple things and Quark Express for complicated things. You may never have heard of templates, but all such programs support those. You can also copy and edit them to visually make new templates. No need to do all your layout work over and over.
But, and that is something people like you don't seem to get, if I need to make a new layout once every 2-3 weeks or so, but need lots of slight variations on it, then a visual tool is more efficient then a markup language. Maybe not for you, but so far everything points at the fact that for most people it is.
I have no problem learning a markup language, and I learned a few of them, but I will stick to those for which I have an actual reason to learn them.
I looked at LaTeX and found it very usefull for the exact things it was intended for, writing documents, manuals and such in standarized format with a very professional look. Also very usefull for other tasks that need a structured approach with seperation of content and layout. Have you ever looked at the other side and tried to be open to why people may find a graphical layout tool usefull in many situations? your reasoning suggests you didn't and are trying to argue from a single point of view, that of a person for whom writing documents is a big thing, and who is blind for any non geeky tools to get the job done.
Ok, first of all, 'nationalism'. Yeah, there is a bit of assumption there, but the thign you wrote is very popular among the same group who believes in 'the new American Century', and serve as propaganda to make America look better then it really is.
It is also a gross over simplification of reality at the very least not to say its plainly wrong.
So, to correct your 'facts': - France didn't just sit and do nothing while being invaded. What they did was not very succesfull tho. Also that is no reason to claim that a majority of the population of Europe supported what happened to the jews, at best the majority did not actively oppose it. - Europe failed to intervene in Serbia, but that was not exactly because they thought it was ok. Followign that reasoning, I guess the USA thought it ok that milions were killed in Rwanda?
It seems to me that you are unable to differentiate between facts and your personal interpretation of reasons.
Last but not least, racism is an evil that is happening in many places, but not every ethnic conflict finds its cause in racism. It is easy to call racism whenever there is a conflict between 2 groups of people from a different race, but very often the underlying reasons have a lot more to do with religion and culture then with race. Not that those are good reasons for waging war, but when looking at why a problem exists, it is a good idea to not be blinded by a pre-determined explanation.
Bottomline, you state both fact and opinion, while not in any way substantiating how you derive opinion from fact while also part of your facts are wrong.
> America led the charge to end this as well. Europe as a whole thought that what Serbia was doing was "OK", just as many Europeans in the 1940s thought that despite Hitler's flaws, it was good that he was solving the Jewish problem.
Nice rewriting of history. I suggest you keep locked up in your over nationalistic propaganda. You may want to realize tho that it is people like you who in fact cause situations like the one in Serbia or in the 1940s. Its blind hatred of that what is different.
> I've lost track of the number of times KDE has had an app or window crash and needed a restart to clear.
That doesn't require a reboot, it does require a restart of kde or at times X.
Does it make a difference? definitely. I have background jobs runnign all the time (things like video compression, compiles of very large sourcetrees (OO.o comes to mind) and so on. I can make sure that those simply continue while X gets restarted. A reboot would not allow that.
But then, I haven't seen KDE or X give up in the last couple of months, and when it did it turned out to be the result of using the development branch of FreeBSD with a development branch of X, and not minding the notes about QT and the nvidia drivers on FreeBSD, so I had myself to blame there.
Of course I am using FreeBSD and not Linux, but I seriously doubt Linux + X + KDE is that much less stable;P
Maybe, maybe not. It was not the point, the point was that products like MS Office or OO are a lot more suitable for most users then specialized tools for every task, and that eventho most people only use a subset, they are using different subsets.
If OO is suitable for a small business will as always depend on the needs.
In other words, more eye candy (which has been a trend for a few decades now) and some enhancements in the editor and AI.. As long as the AI is scheduled instead of tought, I don't think you have much of a breakthrough there, at best an incremental enhancement.
And if that does not give the style I want I'll have to find out how to change it to what I want. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem doing that, but I have simpler ways to achieve the same thing without having to go read a manual, and I do not need it often enough to learn it by heart, and the knowledge would be completely useless for anythign other then using LaTeX.
That is true for a very very very large part of the users of text processing applications in non scientific and non technical environments, which explains why you will not find it often outside those environments.
You are simply ignoring what most people want. If LaTeX works fine for you, perfect, use it. Having to remeber commands that they have to type to get a specific effect is NOT what most users want as can been seen from the popularity of GUIs over CLI with that same type of user. Simply forget it that they are goign to learn a kind of markup langyage if they can do all they have to do by pointign and clicking and NOT HAVING TO REMEMBER OR LEARN MUCH.
What is managable or even more practical for you as a technical user is utterly and entirely irrelevant for the average user, it does not fit into their way of thinking and doing, they do not think in the same terms, and are simply not interested whatsoever in changing that.
So thanks for the example (I already had a very similar one, I am not writing this without knowing TeX and its variations and having used them), but if you wanted to make a point, I suggest you go think about the points that were already made and the subject being discussed. Please keep usign the tools that work well for you, but look at what peopel want and need before giving them any advice, else no matter how well meant, you will be giving the wrong advice.
The transition from horse & buggy to automobile is a bad example, let me give a better and more on topic one:
Untill the invention of the gramaphone and availability to the public of records, the only way to listen to music virtually all people was by going to a live performance.
Once it became possible to listen to music at home whever you wanted to, lots of small music theatres simply went out of business due to lack of customers. The market had changed, and the demand for their product had changed.
Many people desire their results to be able to contain graphics like a business logo, printed signature, picture on a resumee, graph in some document etc etc. For such cases Lotus write would really not do. I have used it btw, and I definitely agree with regards to the outliner, very usefull, and a lot more efficient then what things like Office and OO have indeed.
Anyway, I don't claim to know what peopel need in general, but I do observe what peopel use, and listen to them with regards to why they use it, and what part of it they think to use. From what others posted in this thread as well as simply looking at what sells, it seems clear that for a word processor people want graphics, simple to use but decent layout tools and a whole lot of seldom used features that come in very handy the few times a year you do need them because they just work like everything you already know, and you already have them.
Or you could have kept using WP5 for DOS or whatever version you were using before, and that is exactly what many people did untill after quite a long time no viable alernative had shown up still and they switched to Word as well (tho both WP and AMI Pro showed that it was quite possible to write a word processor for Windows even when you aren't called MS)
The one and only thing that made the company I worked for in the late 90s switch to Word was the simple need to have 100% compatibility with the.doc format btw, AMI Pro did well for us for the rest.
You further say that it was actually features that Word offered that made it better then its competition.. so hmm, maybe I should just go sleep because I fail to see your point;)
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> Slightly complicating the fact was that nobody (not even Jeff) has the source to those games anymore, so they had to write them based on playing the emulation versions, and some of them didn't bother to play for long enough (like their version of Ancipital, which lacks many of the features found in the original)
Source??
Many of those games were written in very primitive assemblers or in machine code directly (no usable assemblers in the early days of the C64)
More geek nostalgia..
Damn, I wouldn't know how much of my time Jeff managed to steal with his silly but amazing games.
I'm not implying you are lying, I am implying that it is a bug that should not be hard to spot, and it surprises me. Bugs in OSS software are entirely possible ;)
Hmm, interesting... you'd think that bug would be easy to reproduce.. yet its not, at least not on the firefox I'm usign here..
> Don't get too excited by this, we have fifty of them here.
Except for the fact that the peopel livign in those 50 can still vote.. not that it really makes a difference this time.. (hmm. come to think of it, it didn't matter much last time either)
If they have to pay per advertisement served or clicked... lets write a bit of perl and try to lighten their warchest a bit ;P
Ambient noise is really no big problem at all as long as a proper microphone is used and the system is trained in a noisy environment.. beign in a hurry is a problem tho.
How about you first proving your facts instead?
On another note, there are more opinions then good/bad.
Propaganda is the proper term for your post, it is simplistic and meant to trigger emotion and prevent reason. That formula is well known and is very recognizable by anyone who for example has looked into what happened during the cold war or in nazi germany.
Incidentely, the Bush government has used it very succesfully to prepare the American population for the Iraq war also.
Ever heard about human error?
A special purpose dictation system can do as well as a human who has no direct interest in the result, overlooked by someone who has a direct interest in correct results is going to do a lot better. The inmediate availability and very little administration efford often outweight the little extra time spent on reading and correcting on the fly.
I have been doing technical support for IBMs dictation software for a while in 1996-97 and a substantial part of our customers back then were doctors and lawyers. Both used special purpose dictionaries and reported that it worked quite well. I would be really surprised if this has gotten worse in the last few years.
Things like medical transcriptions are a lot easier then general purpose transcriptions for a computer and can be a lot more accurate due to more specialized and limited dictionaries.
Well, you were the one who brought up AMI Pro ad said it didn't provide the geatures needed, and you refered to it again in this last post.
Obviously you are giving a slightly simplified picture of the choice and reality looked more like this:
AMI Pro, Did not provide the features.
WP, Has the features but its broken.
Word, Has the features and actually works.
By the way, there was a rather workable DOS version of WP5, which was quite usable in a DOS window provided you managed to get enough free base memory.
Not a desirable situation, but better then it not working at all..
My time is much better spent using a working layout tool when I need it, ie: the 'simple' and limited tools that OO.o (or when it works, Word) offer for simple things and Quark Express for complicated things. You may never have heard of templates, but all such programs support those. You can also copy and edit them to visually make new templates. No need to do all your layout work over and over.
But, and that is something people like you don't seem to get, if I need to make a new layout once every 2-3 weeks or so, but need lots of slight variations on it, then a visual tool is more efficient then a markup language. Maybe not for you, but so far everything points at the fact that for most people it is.
I have no problem learning a markup language, and I learned a few of them, but I will stick to those for which I have an actual reason to learn them.
I looked at LaTeX and found it very usefull for the exact things it was intended for, writing documents, manuals and such in standarized format with a very professional look. Also very usefull for other tasks that need a structured approach with seperation of content and layout. Have you ever looked at the other side and tried to be open to why people may find a graphical layout tool usefull in many situations? your reasoning suggests you didn't and are trying to argue from a single point of view, that of a person for whom writing documents is a big thing, and who is blind for any non geeky tools to get the job done.
Ok, first of all, 'nationalism'. Yeah, there is a bit of assumption there, but the thign you wrote is very popular among the same group who believes in 'the new American Century', and serve as propaganda to make America look better then it really is.
It is also a gross over simplification of reality at the very least not to say its plainly wrong.
So, to correct your 'facts':
- France didn't just sit and do nothing while being invaded. What they did was not very succesfull tho. Also that is no reason to claim that a majority of the population of Europe supported what happened to the jews, at best the majority did not actively oppose it.
- Europe failed to intervene in Serbia, but that was not exactly because they thought it was ok. Followign that reasoning, I guess the USA thought it ok that milions were killed in Rwanda?
It seems to me that you are unable to differentiate between facts and your personal interpretation of reasons.
Last but not least, racism is an evil that is happening in many places, but not every ethnic conflict finds its cause in racism. It is easy to call racism whenever there is a conflict between 2 groups of people from a different race, but very often the underlying reasons have a lot more to do with religion and culture then with race. Not that those are good reasons for waging war, but when looking at why a problem exists, it is a good idea to not be blinded by a pre-determined explanation.
Bottomline, you state both fact and opinion, while not in any way substantiating how you derive opinion from fact while also part of your facts are wrong.
> America led the charge to end this as well. Europe as a whole thought that what Serbia was doing was "OK", just as many Europeans in the 1940s thought that despite Hitler's flaws, it was good that he was solving the Jewish problem.
Nice rewriting of history. I suggest you keep locked up in your over nationalistic propaganda. You may want to realize tho that it is people like you who in fact cause situations like the one in Serbia or in the 1940s. Its blind hatred of that what is different.
My WinTV card came with sensor and remote control.. using my palm m505 as remote now tho.
> I've lost track of the number of times KDE has had an app or window crash and needed a restart to clear.
;P
That doesn't require a reboot, it does require a restart of kde or at times X.
Does it make a difference? definitely. I have background jobs runnign all the time (things like video compression, compiles of very large sourcetrees (OO.o comes to mind) and so on.
I can make sure that those simply continue while X gets restarted. A reboot would not allow that.
But then, I haven't seen KDE or X give up in the last couple of months, and when it did it turned out to be the result of using the development branch of FreeBSD with a development branch of X, and not minding the notes about QT and the nvidia drivers on FreeBSD, so I had myself to blame there.
Of course I am using FreeBSD and not Linux, but I seriously doubt Linux + X + KDE is that much less stable
It is a speed record for a vehicle driven by an air breathing engine (ie, it gets its oxygen from the atmosphere)
Rockets have gone faster, but they carry their own oxygen.
Maybe, maybe not. It was not the point, the point was that products like MS Office or OO are a lot more suitable for most users then specialized tools for every task, and that eventho most people only use a subset, they are using different subsets.
If OO is suitable for a small business will as always depend on the needs.
In other words, more eye candy (which has been a trend for a few decades now) and some enhancements in the editor and AI.. As long as the AI is scheduled instead of tought, I don't think you have much of a breakthrough there, at best an incremental enhancement.
I learned long ago to not judge a game, and esp. not call it revolutionary untill after having played it for a while.
And if that does not give the style I want I'll have to find out how to change it to what I want. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem doing that, but I have simpler ways to achieve the same thing without having to go read a manual, and I do not need it often enough to learn it by heart, and the knowledge would be completely useless for anythign other then using LaTeX.
That is true for a very very very large part of the users of text processing applications in non scientific and non technical environments, which explains why you will not find it often outside those environments.
You are simply ignoring what most people want. If LaTeX works fine for you, perfect, use it. Having to remeber commands that they have to type to get a specific effect is NOT what most users want as can been seen from the popularity of GUIs over CLI with that same type of user. Simply forget it that they are goign to learn a kind of markup langyage if they can do all they have to do by pointign and clicking and NOT HAVING TO REMEMBER OR LEARN MUCH.
What is managable or even more practical for you as a technical user is utterly and entirely irrelevant for the average user, it does not fit into their way of thinking and doing, they do not think in the same terms, and are simply not interested whatsoever in changing that.
So thanks for the example (I already had a very similar one, I am not writing this without knowing TeX and its variations and having used them), but if you wanted to make a point, I suggest you go think about the points that were already made and the subject being discussed. Please keep usign the tools that work well for you, but look at what peopel want and need before giving them any advice, else no matter how well meant, you will be giving the wrong advice.
The transition from horse & buggy to automobile is a bad example, let me give a better and more on topic one:
Untill the invention of the gramaphone and availability to the public of records, the only way to listen to music virtually all people was by going to a live performance.
Once it became possible to listen to music at home whever you wanted to, lots of small music theatres simply went out of business due to lack of customers. The market had changed, and the demand for their product had changed.
Many people desire their results to be able to contain graphics like a business logo, printed signature, picture on a resumee, graph in some document etc etc. For such cases Lotus write would really not do. I have used it btw, and I definitely agree with regards to the outliner, very usefull, and a lot more efficient then what things like Office and OO have indeed.
Anyway, I don't claim to know what peopel need in general, but I do observe what peopel use, and listen to them with regards to why they use it, and what part of it they think to use. From what others posted in this thread as well as simply looking at what sells, it seems clear that for a word processor people want graphics, simple to use but decent layout tools and a whole lot of seldom used features that come in very handy the few times a year you do need them because they just work like everything you already know, and you already have them.
> we had to convert to Word for Windows.
.doc format btw, AMI Pro did well for us for the rest.
;)
Or you could have kept using WP5 for DOS or whatever version you were using before, and that is exactly what many people did untill after quite a long time no viable alernative had shown up still and they switched to Word as well (tho both WP and AMI Pro showed that it was quite possible to write a word processor for Windows even when you aren't called MS)
The one and only thing that made the company I worked for in the late 90s switch to Word was the simple need to have 100% compatibility with the
You further say that it was actually features that Word offered that made it better then its competition.. so hmm, maybe I should just go sleep because I fail to see your point